I have bought metal holdfasts @ £18 aka Roubo hooks. I was impressed to see Ben Glanville's cheap and very effective natural solution from a naturally-grown crook. You want the tree it comes from to be about 28 - 30 mm over bark. When you whittle it down and it dries it will be approx 25 mm and good for a 1" hole. Don't get precise about this, just experiment with your available holes and branchwood!

Brilliant! Obvious once you see it (like the incandescent light bulb). And I have a use for it:Shave Horse "Bowlmate"I recently drilled a couple of 20mm holes in the seat of my shave horse, so that I can use it like a simplified bowlmate, for finishing tweaks to bowls- when I don't want to traipse up the garden & uncover the real bowlmate. I use a 10" shaved stick as my "bench dog" & add wooden blocks as necessary to get a secure fit, against the vertical "slope support block" of the shave horse. It can be used in two ways: one hole is close in, for securing a bowl width-wise, the other is further away, for securing a bowl lengthwise.

It works quite well already but I wondered if it might be worth adding a second hole at each distance, to stop the wedged blocks pivoting out against the dog.The wooden holdfast could offer some additional security & some new fixing options.BTW Where did you get you metal holdfasts? Do they work well? I am thinking of overhauling my workbench.

Last edited by ToneWood on Sun Sep 08, 2013 10:09 am, edited 1 time in total.

I have been tuning them to lock up best in a hole 2 ¼” deep; this is to try to cater for the average bench thickness so they will grip well either side of this depth. Though too thin a bench top and the stress will wear the hole much quicker, too thick and the foot of the holdfast will dig in too much. I have advised people in the past to either glue up a large square of ply underneath the bench prior to boring to make up thickness or to counter bore a larger hole underneath in much thicker benches to leave a hole of 2 1/4" to 2 ½” deep.

ToneWood wrote: Do they work well? [/i]

Yes, but the hole must be precisely tuned to the diameter of the shaft.